Autumn in New England is not subtle.
The trees ignite almost overnight, and suddenly every familiar road feels magical. Gold spills across the hillsides and the maple trees blaze orange and crimson. On bluebird days, the contrast of sky and earth is almost impossible to take in. The world becomes a treasure chest flung open to the sun.
I can’t get enough.
A Turkey Vulture Comes to Visit
This fall, amid all that color, I have been visited by a turkey vulture. I’m envisioning her as a she, but in truth I don’t really know.
I think she may be roosting nearby. Our introduction was striking. I was out walking when I noticed a giant bird perched on an old tree. As I passed, she spread her enormous wings and performed a slow little turn, as if showing off just for me.
Since then, I have seen her perched on our house and circling overhead during the day. Each appearance feels more like a visit than a sighting.
Grief, Art, and an Unexpected Visitor
The most powerful encounter came on a day when I was carrying around more than I knew what to do with.
For some time, I have been struggling with the way women are treated in our society and the downhill slide we can’t seem to reverse. It’s not only the terrifying violence but the systems that minimize it, excuse it, and ask women to keep proving the truth of their own experience. Jane Doe’s account of the sexual violence she experienced at Cornell, and the university’s inept handling of her report, brought all of those fears into sharp focus. I felt frightened, heartsick, and overwhelmed by the endlessness of it all.
So I turned to the thing that has always helped me move through emotions too complicated for words: my art.
I took my sketchbook outside and sat down to purge my overwhelm through oil pastels and charcoal.
And then the turkey vulture landed about fifteen feet away from me.
She looked right at me. Like into my soul. And then she stood there quietly observing the backyard. It felt like she was keeping watch.
For nearly ten minutes, neither of us went anywhere.
I watched the bird and let its presence wash over me. I cried. I scribbled. I took deep breaths. I did not try to force the moment into meaning while it was happening. I only sat with this strange, silent creature who had chosen, for whatever reason, to stay near me.
Strange Beauty
Turkey vultures are creatures of startling contradictions. Their featherless red heads look severe, even frightening. There is something prehistoric about them, something that makes us recoil before we have had time to understand what we are seeing.
And yet, attached to that odd and unsettling head is a magnificent body. Up close, their feathers are rich in umbers and ochres. In flight, their wings can span nearly six feet. They rise on warm currents of air with astonishing grace, barely moving as the world passes beneath them.
They are also essential caretakers. They consume what has died, clearing decay from the landscape and returning its nutrients to the living world.
A Symbol of Transformation
Perhaps that is why vultures have become symbols of purification,
transformation, and rebirth. They stand at the threshold between endings and beginnings. They do not turn away from what is dead or damaged. They take it in and help transform it.
Therein lay my lesson.
We are often encouraged to seek the light while avoiding what’s shadowed, uncomfortable, and sad. But growth asks something more difficult of us. It asks us to look directly at what hurts in order to truly acknowledge and understand it. It asks us to tell the truth about what is broken. Not because brokenness is the whole story, but because we can’t transform what we refuse to acknowledge.
We need to live in the truth even when the truth is ugly. Even when we feel ugly.
Optimism and Work
As someone who is devoted to making the world more beautiful through art, I grapple with this. Beauty can be a refuge, but I do not want it to become an escape. I want to make a kind of beauty spacious enough to contain sorrow, rage, fear, and imperfection. A beauty that does not hide the wound, but helps us remain present long enough for healing to begin.
Simon Sinek describes optimism as “the undying belief that the future is bright.” But this belief does not require us to deny what is happening now. As he says, “We can sit in the hell and darkness and struggle now” while still believing in a brighter future.
Optimism isn’t blindness. It is the willingness to face the world as it is without surrendering our belief in what it can become. That kind of optimism is not passive. It demands resilience. It demands work.
Hope as a Practice
I often feel so powerless beneath the daily barrage of cruelty, violence, and human indifference. There are moments when hope can feel embarrassingly small beside the scale of what is wrong. But autumn reminds me that change is not an interruption of life. Change is life. Endings and beginnings are forever arriving together.
The leaves turn gold because they are letting go.
The turkey vulture survives by moving toward what the rest of us would rather avoid.
And beneath the apparent death of the season, the living world is already preparing to begin again.
I don’t believe renewal happens simply because we wait for it. We participate in it. We make it possible every time we refuse to look away, every time we tell the truth, every time we turn grief into art or anger into action. Every time we choose to care when indifference would be easier, we help carry the world from what has been toward what might still be.
Looking Up
That afternoon, the turkey vulture eventually lifted its wings and returned to the sky. I stayed with my sketchbook, still sad, but no longer quite so alone.
Above me, that strange, beautiful bird has circled many times. It’s not a promise that everything will be all right. But, she is a reminder that what we are willing to face can be transformed. And, that hope is something we must choose to build.
New Paintings
Somewhere in the midst of all this, two new paintings came to life. In First Chill, autumn color blazes against a cool sky, while The Other Side looks toward the warmth and possibility of what comes next. I’m happy to share them with you!
